BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

Actually wait

Why are you switching off Christmas

If the dynasty is still going by Christmas we need to work overtime to wrap it up.

For what it’s worth, I think having “Dynastic Distance” off whenever possible is a good thing (and it should probably be marked as Rare).

If the Emperor is interacting with the dynasty’s mechanics in the same way as the other players, it’ll give them a better idea of what the other players are thinking, what needs balance improvements, whether proposals would break the game, etc.

Of course, some mechanics (in particular victory mechanics, plus anything that requires the user to not know any Emperor-tracked secret information) can’t be given to the Emperor, but it makes more sense to exclude those case-by-case rather than just exclude everything.

(All that is to say – I’d rather have the dynasty run by someone who is playing it, rather than someone who wants to just be there as a figurehead.)

Before Dynastic Distance there were plenty of rounds where the Emperor had been a player, but was in no way “playing the game”, just setting up a few funny gamestate values at the start and never getting their teeth into things. Sometimes players have proposed to Distance that kind of Emperor towards endgame, just to remove the uncertainty of what happens if they suddenly decide to wake up destabilise things by spending an enormous stockpile.

@ais asymmetrical play is still play!! the emperor-as-game-master is still an active participant in the game, and tho a non-distanced emperor can interact with dynastic gameplay like other players, they can’t have the same *goal* as other players (if they have a goal at all), which makes for a different experience of that gameplay